Consider all costs in purchase of digital camera

Digital photography is flying high these days and headed even higher. Americans are so taken with the technology that last year they bought nearly 8 million digital cameras and are expected to buy even more in 2002, surpassing sales of conventional film cameras.

It's hardly a wonder. Digital is as near instant gratification as it gets. Consumers love viewing pictures instantly and immediately deleting the worst ones. They love the ease of computer accessing, editing and e-mailing photos.

Business uses also are growing, as companies use digital photos for inventory and project control, to notify clients and personnel of merchandise and operations, to illustrate Web sites, and for print advertising.

If you're thinking about buying a digital camera, here are some tips:

1. Consider all the costs. Digital cameras truly are getting phenomenally better and much less expensive. Using rechargeable batteries, digital photos should cost less than a penny apiece to shoot, but watch out for the "hidden" costs of printing. Although good inkjet printers are relatively cheap, color ink cartridges run from about $24 to $39 apiece and provide disappointingly few prints before replacement. Photo-quality paper runs from 50 cents to a $1 or more per page. Consumers can save some home-printing cost by getting photos printed by local businesses. In Springfield, excellent-quality 4-by-6-inch printouts can be found for as little as 29 cents, 8-by-10s for less than $3. Many online services also offer printouts.

2. Buy the camera that takes the pictures most pleasing to your own eye. Buying based mainly on camera specs, as some do, ignores lens quality, an absolutely crucial factor. Ask dealers to see comparison photos from different cameras. Several Web sites also offer comparison photos.

3. Buy the highest-resolution camera you can afford. In digital photography, maximum image resolution, or sharpness, is a critical factor and expressed in "megapixels" millions of pixels. A 1.2-megapixel camera can yield good images for screen display, e-mailing and good 3-by-5 prints, but can't produce truly sharp prints in larger formats. A 3.2-megapixel camera can produce very sharp prints up to and including 8-by-10s. A 4.1-or-higher-megapixel camera can produce superb prints even in larger formats.

4. Make sure the camera and any included cables and cataloguing or image-editing software will work with your computer.

5. Once you have the camera and are ready to post and print pictures, don't confuse "pixels" with "dots." Pixel is a digital image term and dot only a printer term. Resolution of digital images is measured in ppi (pixels per inch), resolution of printed images in dpi (dots per inch). In setting up to print, the values must differ because inkjet printers print more than one dot per pixel. The Epson 850, for example, prints four dots per pixel, so to get the best resolution, the printer setting (dpi) must be four times the image setting (ppi). I know it's a little technical, but hang on to the point. It'll keep you from going crazy later.

6. Do yourself a huge time-saving, mind-easing favor and buy a good book on digital photography. The two best I've seen are "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Digital Photography" (Alpha Books, Indianapolis, 2002) and "A Simple Guide to Digital Photography" (Watson-Guphill Publications, New York, 2002).

7. Expect a learning curve. All digital cameras are auto exposure and auto focus point-and-shoot, but some situations require using manual settings, which can get extremely technical.

Finally, lest all this sound too ponderously serious,

8. Have fun with digital photography. Take a picture of yourself, then call it up on screen and give yourself a PhotoShop facelift into sheer gorgeousness. Or digitize a picture of a bad ex-girlfriend or boyfriend and black out a tooth. I mean, really, the sky's the limit.

(Frank Shipe is a former SBJ staffer and current free-lance writer.)